Staying Vertical

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$21.99

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Filmmaker Leo is traveling through the south of France. During a scouting excursion he is seduced by Marie, a free-spirited and dynamic shepherdess. Nine months later she gives birth to their child. Suffering from post-natal depression and with no faith in Leo, who comes and goes without warning (and has sex with men), Marie abandons both of them. Leo finds himself alone, with a baby to care for. It's not easy, but deep down, he loves it. Through a series of unexpected and unusual encounters, struggling to find inspiration for his next film, Leo will do whatever it takes to stay standing.

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Reasons to Buy

From Alain Guiraudie, the visionary director behind Stranger by the Lake, comes a surreal new comedy played with a completely straight face. This one is stranger and more impressionistic than his last masterpiece, but it's a stand-out nonetheless.

Leo, the lead character, has a casually fluid sexuality. He's equally attracted to both Marie (with whom he has a child) and Yoan, a hunky young man to whom he is mysteriously drawn.

The film has a startling, unforgettable sex scene that combines progressive rock, a man-on-man mercy fuck with an elderly man... and an assisted suicide. You'll need to see it to believe it.

Reviews

1 Review
for Staying Vertical

Review by Amos Lassen

By: Amos Lassen

"Staying Vertical" ("Rester vertical")Struggling with Creativity, Responsibility, Fatherhood, and SexualityAmos LassenLéo (Damien Bonnard) is a drifting screenwriter who both resides in hotel rooms and crashes with strangers, becomi...
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"Staying Vertical" ("Rester vertical")Struggling with Creativity, Responsibility, Fatherhood, and SexualityAmos LassenLéo (Damien Bonnard) is a drifting screenwriter who both resides in hotel rooms and crashes with strangers, becoming involved with Marie (India Hair), a woman living somewhere in the French countryside. They have a child together, and Marie leaves Léo and the baby. This Leo to deal with his selfishness as he struggles to raise his son and come up with a screenplay adequate enough to pay his bills. So far this sounds ordinary but there is very little that is ordinary in "Staying Vertical". The film is directed by Alain Guiraudie who gave us "Stranger By the Lake" another film that is not ordinary. Both films show a powerfully tactile understanding of sexual relationships as universes onto themselves, both deal with stifled male sexuality, and both pivot on heroes who are essentially and existentially displaced voyeurs.

"Staying Vertical" begins with a prolonged traveling shot from Léo's perspective as he drives into the country, passing beautiful and hinting strongly that we're in the process of becoming Leo. We see variations of this shot throughout the film as we are taken deeper into the Leo's mental state, even as he sheds identities of his own, restarting his sense of self over and again. Leo frequently takes one step forward in his life, only to go stumbling three steps back.Léo's anxieties deal with his desire for freedom and stability and there is really nothing special about this for an aging and somewhat bohemian artist. And what do we see of Léo and Marie's relationship? Both characters seem to enjoy constrictions and the comfort of normative relationships. Guiraudie lingers on Marie's vagina in close-up as Léo's head rests on her stomach. In this and other images, we feel so close to this couple that we almost feel the passion coming from their bodies. However, both parties have other desires. Apart from Marie feeling trapped by her father, Jean-Louis (Raphaël Thiéry), helping him to farm and guard his lambs from wolves, her yearnings are hauntingly, pointedly unexplored, though she's clearly unhappy. Léo has pronounced sexual tension with nearly every man he meets. (Marie is one of only two women in the film.)

Damien Bonnard in Staying VerticalAudiences may initially wonder if Léo is a con artist, given how he drifts from situation to situation with a peculiar element of self-entitlement changing from writer to farmer to lover, to father and to wanderer. He thinks nothing of stopping by the side of the road to hit on a handsome young man, Yoan (Basile Meilleurat), under the embarrassingly tired pretense of scouting for a film. Léo also forms a bond with the older man with whom Yoan lives on and off again, Marcel, (Christian Bouillette). Léo moves back and forth between these characters in a series of increasingly violent and sexualized episodes and the urgency of his constant movement grows more distressful.Whenever we believe that Leo has finally settled into a recognizable narrative pattern, the film changes direction. Léo eventually sits down to write the screenplay that has been inside of him, camping along a river with a healer and a film producer and just as we think that it's time for his happy ending to begin, he feels compelled to hit the road again, risking poverty and death.

Guiraudie simulates chaos by not using standardized notions of foreshadowing and payoff. This film captures various interior states of panic and detachment as well as a longing for escape from these emotional realms. Leo's first encounter is with Marie with whom he has a child. Her father Jean-Louis allows him in to the household ? and may even have designs on him himself. Marie, however in what seems to be post-natal depression, leaves with her two other children.Leo's then meets Yoan whom he tries to talk in to auditioning for him although there may be a hidden agenda. Yoan seems to care for old man Marcel and we are never sure it they are sexually involved. At the same time, Jean-Louis declares an interest in bedding Leo which, if he agreed, would mean he would be having sex with his son's grandfather.

A fairy tale aspect of the narrative comes when Leo seeks solace with an alternative faith healer (Laure Calamy) who lives in an isolated abode. Guiraudie has no problem with and doses so matter of factly and this even includes our seeing Marie give birth to his son. He is a master story-teller who draws us in ally to his world in which conventional ideas of normality are constantly confronted.Some viewers may be taken aback by this surreal, seriocomic waking nightmare about a filmmaker turned vagabond whose "sexual identity defies labels nearly as brazenly as this narrative eludes explanation". Guiraudie gives us several provocative moments with a film that presents sex as a revolving door between life and death.We see that Leo is unable to maintain control over his existence. The title of the film is a direct reference to indicate walking upright without fear is the only way to avoid the savagery of the world. But it's also a way to stay constantly moving. It is an indication of life vs. certain s death. We first see Leo as a filmmaker who descends upon the countryside and alters the realities of those he encounters there, first as a sexual conquistador. There is a great deal of offbeat humor (including Leo's trips to see a female medicine woman living in a hut in the woods who hooks him up to foliage to read his vitals) and elliptical references which makes the film seem like a warped fairy tale. Guiraudie rein his fascination with debauched (in more ways than one) narratives, and while he remains a filmmaker destined to appeal to distinctive tastes, he's lost none of his particularly generous ambitions relating to the fluidity of sexuality as an act of not just pleasure or procreation, but also kindness.

Guiraudie's humor is at times hilarious. His tendency to shock might seem at times adolescent but he's also careful to identify taboos that perhaps shouldn't be taboos at all. The film has no realistic message and it isn't supposed to make any realistic sense (I think). This is Guiraudie's universe and his characters just live there. As such, he can do what he wants. With little deference to expectations or prescribed notions of normality (whatever that means), Guiraudie gives us another strange, totally unpredictable anatomy of the human condition.